Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

In giving her the entire use of his money all those years, in leaving her the house and everything he possessed apart from Sarah’s and Hope’s legacies, in making her his literary executor, he was compensating for—what? For more than neglect and near ostracism, for more than contempt and the theft of her children. He was making up to her for the dreadful thing he had done and on account of which he had taken on the identity of someone’s dead child.

She sat down on the turf in the lee of the dunes and wrapped her arms around her knees. The sea was half a mile away, a line of silver, a line of white foam, and between her and the tide edge, the lone and level sands stretched, bleak, pale, empty. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.” The hand that mocked them, she thought, and the heart that fed. She would move; she would sell the house now, no matter what the girls said. “I don’t want to know what he did,” she said aloud. “I don’t any longer ask why.”

Once she had. Twenty-eight years ago, she still had wanted very much to know. She was young and she thought she knew. Yet the proof of it was a great shock. It is one thing to suspect your husband of infidelity, another to have his infidelity confirmed. This was how Jean must have felt when Ian confessed. Ursula knew Gerald would never confess to anything. If Dickie Parfitt had merely seen him go to a house, be let into a house, and spend time there, she would have thought very little of it, but Gerald had had a key. He had a key to a house in a street in Leyton and let himself into it with his own key, as a husband might. As an accredited lover might.

She had looked at Dickie Parfitt’s photographs. The one of the old woman was clear enough, but she was just an old woman in a felt hat and a buttoned-up coat. The man in the other photograph might have been Gerald, but it was out of focus and no face could be seen. Perhaps he owned the house. What did she know? He might have lived there himself once, kept it when he moved to Hampstead, now allowed this woman to live there.

Ursula thought she would go to the house and see the woman who lived there, speak to her, find out the truth. But the idea was at first a dream, a fantasy; she would be terrified to do that. And then she asked herself if she really would be afraid. What was there to be afraid of?

Her mother had taken to coming over while Pauline was with them. She had regularly paid a monthly visit to have tea with the children and to admire Gerald’s “way” with them, but that August she came at least once a week. Ostensibly, this was to be with Pauline, the granddaughter she seldom saw because Pauline lived in Manchester, but her true purpose was to discuss her son’s broken marriage.

In the world of Herbert and Betty Wick, divorce was so rare as to be practically nonexistent. To Betty, it had been something that happened in the lives of Hollywood film stars, and even there, she believed—or, at any rate, said—it was engaged in solely for its publicity value. Marriage was an absolute, as rock-solid and in a way as physical as birth and death. Love, compatibility, preference scarcely came into it.

She and Herbert had known each other since they were both fifteen, had married at twenty-one, had neither of them looked in anyone else’s direction. If the question of marital discord was raised, she would say that so-and-so chose his or her partner and therefore should be content with that choice forever after. Minds that could be changed on almost any other issue—Betty sometimes said sagely that it was a woman’s privilege to change her mind—must be adamant here, and the heart had no option but to remain true.

So Ian’s defection had left her bewildered as well as horrified. To Ursula, she said repeatedly, “I don’t understand it. I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing. He chose her, didn’t he?”

If Gerald was present, he listened intently to what Betty said. He fixed her with his bright, dark eyes, frowning slightly, hanging on her words. And she was flattered by his attention and by the encouragement he gave her to utter further absurdities.

“Of course I blame her, as well. Marriage is a matter of give-and-take, and you have to work at it; you both have to work at it.”

“It takes two to tango,” said Gerald.

Betty wasn’t sure about that phrase, having never heard it before. Nor had Ursula then, and for all she knew, Gerald might have invented it himself. But her mother liked the encouragement, saying, “Well, exactly.”

Betty loved Gerald. He was the only husband she had ever come across who stayed at home all day and still earned money. Ursula thought then that Gerald had listened so intently to what was said because of his own adulterous behavior. He had an interest, as they said. Later on, of course, she knew why he had listened. He had been making mental notes and every sentence Betty uttered found its way into Time Too Swift five years later.

Betty said that as for the girl—Judy, who would become Ian’s second wife—Herbert thought she ought to be horsewhipped.

“How about skimmity riding?” said Gerald.

Betty didn’t know what that was, nor did Ursula then, the works of Hardy not being among her reading matter. In a grave but approving voice, Gerald explained how once in rural England women who misbehaved were made to mount a horse, sit facing its rump, and be driven around the town to loud music and the jeers of the populace. Betty took it seriously and said that those were the days.

She nearly didn’t come the following week because Ursula told her Gerald wouldn’t be there; he was going down to Devon again to do more research. Even Ursula couldn’t believe he had a mistress in Devon and another one in London, so she accepted the research story and thought of the key he had to the house in Goodwin Road. She would go there while her mother was in the house, minding the children with Pauline’s help. It was an arrangement to suit everyone.

But she was afraid of going. It happened to her often, at this stage of her life and later, to think of herself as she had been just a few years before, six or seven years before, and say to herself, This isn’t me. I can’t be doing this thing, these things. I can’t have come to this. I can’t have been treated like this, used like this; it can’t be true. And she would look in the mirror, seeing herself as very much unchanged since the time she was twenty-three, her face still round and pretty, calm and composed, her hair still smooth, shoulder-length, sand-colored, her eyes still the same gray-blue. But perhaps the self-satisfaction that had been in them was gone.

So she said to herself, I must wake up and find myself at home in Purley, in my bed with the gauzy curtains springing from the golden crown and Cicely Mary Barker’s Airymouse, Airymouse on the wall and the southern suburbs outside the window. Work to go to in Dad’s office, books from the library, watching television with Pam, getting ready to invite Colin Wrightson to the Library Users’ Association … But she awoke always in her own bed in Holly Mount, to hear the children in the summer dawns talking and laughing in Gerald’s room, and once to hear him, still in the dark, scream out a loud, terrible scream, so that she had run in to him without a thought.…

That was after she had been to Goodwin Road and seen Mrs. Eady and heard what Mrs. Eady had to say and so had no choice but to stay with Gerald. Of course, she had a choice, but it hadn’t seemed like that then. It seemed as if he had done nothing, as if it was he who had to forgive her for her suspicions, while she must take him for what he was and continue to hope.

Was it the morning following her visit to the house in Leyton that he had woken screaming? It felt to her as if it was, and yet it couldn’t have been, for he was away in Devon that night, house hunting, as she later knew. So it must have been a morning or two later, a dawn, rather, when the eastern sky had just begun to lighten.